Immediately after October 7th, 2023, when Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel killed more than 800 Israeli civilians, some major institutions of Holocaust and genocide studies determined that their mission required them to speak out. The University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, which had not put out an official statement on current events since the murder of George Floyd in 2020, issued a condemnation of the “heinous attacks,” concluding that “violence targeting civilian populations, in any form, has no place in society and cannot be tolerated.” The US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), which also runs a research center on genocide prevention and publishes the Holocaust and Genocide Studies journal, published a statement expressing solidarity with “the many Holocaust survivors who helped build the State of Israel, where they could finally live in the freedom and security they deserved after centuries of persecution, and ultimately genocide.” And in November, a group of scholars at the Lessons & Legacies Europe Holocaust studies conference—including elder statesmen of the field like the historians Yehuda Bauer and Saul Friedländer—released a statement arguing that “the indiscriminate killings of children, women, and men whose only crime was being Jewish unavoidably bring to mind the mindset and the methods of the perpetrators of the pogroms that paved the way to the Final Solution.”

But as Israel immediately began a brutal bombing campaign against Gaza—which killed more people in the first week alone than the Hamas attacks had—and cut off food, fuel, and water to the territory, some scholars of genocide tried to spread a different message. On October 13th, as the Israeli government ordered a wholesale evacuation from the north of Gaza—and after the minister of defense said that Israel was “fighting human animals,” and media personalities began urging the government to “flatten Gaza”—the historian Raz Segal, director of the program of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, wrote in a widely shared article in this magazine, “A Textbook Case of Genocide,” that Israel was demonstrating “explicit, open, and unashamed” intent to commit genocide as defined by the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention. In December, as the death toll in Gaza approached 20,000, hospitals faced collapse under Israeli bombardment and blockade, and photos circulated of Palestinian men forced to strip to their underwear at gunpoint, Segal organized a letter signed by 60 Holocaust and genocide scholars warning that “the time for concerted action to prevent genocide is now.”

And yet, amid this ever-worsening assault, many of the scholars and institutions that had issued or signed statements condemning Hamas after October 7th stayed silent. They said nothing even as South Africa argued before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in January that Israel was committing genocide, and even as the court allowed the case to move forward, finding it “plausible” that some of Israel’s acts could indeed be prohibited by the Genocide Convention. (When the one-year anniversary of October 7th rolled around, the USHMM issued another statement condemning the Hamas attacks—and made no mention of Palestinian civilians.) Little changed even after Amnesty International published a landmark report accusing Israel of genocide in December 2024. For Nimer Sultany, a scholar of international law at SOAS University of London, this silence pointed to a glaring double standard, in which many scholars could rush to imply that the Palestinians had committed acts reminiscent of genocide, but be “unable to or unwilling to make the same charge against Israel, when Israel has committed much worse atrocities against the Palestinians since then.” “This shows that the early use of genocide was propagandistic and political in nature. It shows that they don’t care in the same way about Palestinian civilians or Palestinian victims,” he said.